Woodson had moved on in search of new lands and for months he traveled into the west, moving by easy stages with his little pack string, sampling the ledges and panning the streams en route. Everywhere there was food in plenty and he lived off the country as he roamed. He came at last into a land whose natural wealth staggered his imagination, the giant forests of the northwest coast. There were stretches where he might travel for weeks without once leaving the timber; and such timber! Fir, spruce and cedar side by side, each monster capable of furnishing from within its own mighty trunk the lumber for a small village. They stood ten to eighteen feet through at the butts, rising with barely perceptible lessening of dimension, towering three hundred feet aloft, two-thirds of their height without a limb. From these a man might cut beams six feet through by a hundred feet in length as easily as eight-inch board stuff is cut from the average tree. Week after week he wandered through this king of forests, the ferns growing to his saddle skirts. There was one stretch of a hundred miles each way, covered with a solid stand of the finest timber known to man. He lingered in this tract for a solid year. Here, in this one stretch, he estimated, was enough lumber to rebuild the world, lumber that was clear, straight-grained and without a knot. He was a man of the open, attuned to Nature’s varying moods; he had felt the different spells exerted by mountain, lake and plain and thought that he knew them all; yet here was something new. There was a hush in the dim aisles of this mightiest of all forests, a reverent silence rarely broken. It was so completely roofed over by the tufted tops as to almost exclude the light. Even the night sounds were subdued as if the wild things hesitated to raise their voices above the softest croon and cheep necessary for communication among themselves. Woodson some way disliked to shatter the silence with his voice and when he spoke to his horses it was in the modulated tones one uses in some ancient cathedral freighted with reverent memories.